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Attempts at edgy film­mak­ing dur­ing the pre-ratings sys­tem era of Hollywood were often very inter­est­ing because they had to work very hard to cre­ate the illu­sion of being sleazy.  Denied the option to show explicit vio­lent or sex­ual con­tent, film­mak­ers work­ing in this sys­tem had to find ways to sug­gest the pres­ence of this for­bid­den con­tent via char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and dia­logue.  When this aes­thetic sleight-of-hand worked, the result could have a pal­pa­ble inten­sity that was as excit­ing as the for­bid­den con­tent being hinted at.

A great exam­ple of this approach is Kitten With A Whip.  This Ann-Margret vehi­cle fea­tures the bomb­shell as Jody, a trou­bled teen who we first meet as she’s run­ning from would-be cap­tors.  She sneaks into the home of aspir­ing politico David Stratton (John Forsythe), a mar­ried man whose wife is on vaca­tion.  He’s a decent guy who tries to help the trou­bled girl, only to dis­cover she is a vio­lent escapee from a deten­tion home.   Even worse, the decid­edly bipo­lar Jody threat­ens to black­mail him with false rape charges and put an end to his career if he tries to send her back.

Thus begins a cat-and-mouse night­mare where David tries to find a safe, non-career-threatening escape from his wak­ing night­mare as Jody keeps upping the dan­ger­ous ante.  For starters, she invites a group of thug­gish friends led by the beatnik-talking nihilist Ron (Peter Brown).  Before long, a fur­ther pileup of trou­ble results in a night­time road trip across the bor­der into Tijuana where David is forced to make one last bid for free­dom before he ends up dead or in jail.

The end result has to basi­cally bluff the audi­ence into think­ing they see and hear more dan­ger­ous con­tent than they actu­ally do — and Kitten With A Whip man­ages to pull off this impos­si­ble task.  A lot of it has to do with the savvy of writer/director Douglas Heyes, a t.v. vet­eran who is best known in the film world for pen­ning the script to Howard Hughes’ favorite film Ice Station Zebra.  He uses fan­tas­tic black-and-white pho­tog­ra­phy by Joseph Biroc to cre­ate a shad­owy, fatal­is­tic noir mood and crafts his dia­logue exchanges so they  moves at skit­tery, ner­vous pace that seems to hint that sud­den death is just around the cor­ner.  The bom­bas­tic sleaze-jazz score, assem­bled from Universal Films library stuff by com­posers like Henry Mancini and Bill Loose, add the per­fect final touch for the film’s swinging-yet-dangerous style.

That said, it’s the per­for­mances in Kitten With A Whip that really seal the deal.  Forsythe nails his good-guy-in-a-bad-situation char­ac­ter, using his nat­ural grav­i­tas to sell us on the character’s innate decency and com­mu­ni­cat­ing the character’s strained nerves in the later scenes via sub­tle facial expres­sions and body lan­guage.  Brown, who would later become a favorite with exploita­tion fans via turns in flicks like Act Of Vengeance and Foxy Brown, has a ball deliv­er­ing his character’s twisty hep-cat dia­logue and ham­ming it up in his best “young Method actor” style.

The cherry atop this sleaze sun­dae is pro­vided by Ann-Margret’s unhinged turn as Jody: the role requires to play every­thing from lost lit­tle girl to sneer­ing hell-cat and she throws her­self into it with hip-swinging, nostril-flaring fer­vor.  She’s a mar­vel to watch as she blazes across the screen with total aban­don — and the fact that she was in her sexbomb prime makes it all the sweeter.

The end result is a delight­ful blast of pre R-rating fun that still packs a punch despite its con­tent lim­i­ta­tions.  Kitten With A Whip proves that sleaze, like sex­i­ness, is a mat­ter of the proper attitude.